Leveraging multirater feedback to facilitate successful behavioral change.

Despite the popularity of multirater feedback for coaching and talent development, there is a paucity of research supporting its effectiveness for sustained behavioral change. Meta-analytic studies on feedback interventions suggest that these interventions have significant, albeit small, effect sizes and often sizable negative impact on emotions and behavioral change (Kluger & DeNisi, 1996; Smither, London, & Reilly, 2005). This article presents a new integrated 3-step theoretical model for individual behavioral change and practical suggestions for leveraging the impact of multirater feedback to facilitate successful behavioral change over time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reassessing Rogers' necessary and sufficient conditions of change.

This article reviews the impact of Carl Rogers' postulate about the necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic change on the field of psychotherapy. It is proposed that his article (see record 2007-14630-002) made an impact in two ways; first, by acting as a spur to researchers to identify the active ingredients of therapeutic change; and, second, by providing guidelines for therapeutic practice. The role of the necessary and sufficient conditions in process-experiential therapy, an emotion-focused therapy for individuals, and their limitations in terms of research and practice are discussed. It is proposed that although the conditions are necessary and important in promoting clients' affect regulation, they do not take sufficient account of other moderating variables that affect clients' response to treatment and may need to be balanced with more structured interventions. Notwithstanding, Rogers highlighted a way of interacting with clients that is generally acknowledged as essential to effective psychotherapy practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change.

This reprinted article originally appeared in Journal of Consulting Psychology, 1957(Apr), Vol 21(2), 95-103. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 1959-00842-001.) "For constructive personality change to occur, it is necessary that these conditions exist and continue over a period of time: (1) Two persons are in psychological contact. (2) The first, whom we shall term the client, is in a state of incongruence, being vulnerable or anxious. (3) The second person, whom we shall term the therapist, is congruent or integrated in the relationship. (4) The therapist experiences unconditional positive regard for the client. (5) The therapist experiences an empathic understanding of the client's internal frame of reference and endeavors to communicate this experience to the client. (6) The communication to the client of the therapist's empathic understanding and unconditional positive regard is to a minimal degree achieved." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change.

(This reprinted article originally appeared in the Journal of Consulting Psychology, 1957, Vol 21, 95–203. The following abstract of the original article appeared in PA, Vol 33:842.) For constructive personality change to occur, it is necessary that these conditions exist and continue over a period of time: (1) Two persons are in psychological contact. (2) The first, whom shall be termed the client, is in a state of incongruence, being vulnerable or anxious. (3) The 2nd person, whom shall be termed the therapist, is congruent or integrated in the relationship. (4) The therapist experiences unconditional positive regard for the client. (5) The therapist experiences an empathic understanding of the client's internal frame of reference and endeavors to communicate this experience to the client. (6) The communication to the client of the therapist's empathic understanding and unconditional positive regard is to a minimal degree achieved. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Personality change as a result of an experimental change of environmental conditions.

To what extent can personality change, when it occurs, be understood in terms of effect of specific environmental conditions? In a large clerical organization, two experimental groups were created and subjected for more than a year to different programs of control. A paper-and-pencil questionnaire designed specifically to measure 26 personality trends to which each of the programs had some degree of relevance was administered near the beginning of the experimental period and about a year later at the end." The two programs "were seen to have profound effects on the subjects' attitudes toward the company and satisfactions in it." A table of before-after correlations and incidence of change is presented. "Twelve changes in the predicted direction prove significant at the .05 level of confidence. Six changes significant at the .05 level occur in a direction opposite to that predicted… . Although somewhat ambiguous, the data seem to indicate that measurable change can be effected by a persisting change in environmental conditions." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Compliance and attitude change under conditions of differential social reinforcement.

12 Ss known to have positive attitudes toward the church, as measured by a modification of Thurstone's scale, were induced to read a strongly antichurch essay before 3-person audiences. Unknown to any of the Ss, 4 speakers addressed prochurch listeners, 4 read the speech to neutral groups, and 4 faced audiences composed of antichurch individuals. All of the groups then discussed the communication for 12 min. The speakers as a group showed a change in attitude toward the church consistent with the position taken by the comunication. This change toward a less favorable stand was found to come principally from those speakers who had discussed the speech with individuals who were either neutral or negatively disposed toward the church. The results are interpreted as supporting a reinforcement theory of attitude change in an induced compliance situation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Persistence of opinion change induced under conditions of forewarning and distraction.

96 high school students participated in a study investigating the immediate and delayed effects of forewarning of persuasive intent. It was predicted that Ss would change less immediately after reading persuasive communications because the forewarning would serve as a discounting cue, but that over time they would tend to forget or dissociate this cue, thus allowing the full impact of the communication to emerge. The results strongly support this hypothesis. Exp II, involving 104 high school students, was conducted to replicate Exp I and extend the same reasoning to the case of distraction. Distraction was expected to facilitate immediate opinion change, presumably because of interference with counterarguments; but because of its detrimental effect on comprehension and a presumed tendency for Ss to think of opposing arguments after leaving the experimental situation, the change was expected to dissipate more rapidly than in the nondistracted conditions. The data confirm predictions regarding both forewarning and distraction. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of different social feedback conditions upon performance in dyadic teams.

27 pairs of Ss working as dyadic teams were given 50 trials on a simple knobturning task with one of 6 combinations of feedback conditions. Response measures consisted of individual response accuracy, team accuracy, and response differentiation between team members. Significant differences between feedback conditions on each of the measures was obtained. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Organizational use of therapeutic change: Strengthening multisource feedback systems through interdisciplinary coaching.

The use of multisource feedback as a management development tool is examined by integrating the empirical and theoretical literature on individual change from the fields of industrial/organizational psychology and clinical/counseling psychology. The assumptions underlying 360-degree feedback as a sufficient process of producing managerial change are questioned in terms of the theoretical and metaanalytic literature regarding the causes of personal change. It is argued that 360-degree feedback is best used as a springboard for management development. Lasting change is best achieved through an interdisciplinary coaching strategy involving what we know about adult development and change from industrial and clinical literature and practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Learnability and feedback.

N. J. Bohannon and L. Stanowicz (see record 1989-00984-001) have claimed that contrary to popular belief, children do receive negative evidence about the ungrammaticality of their utterances in the form of recasts, expansions, and repetitions. Bohannon and Stanowicz argue that given such negative evidence, learnability theory shows that natural languages can be learned and that there is no need to postulate innate knowledge based on such arguments. The present article establishes what exactly the claims of learnability really entail, and demonstrates that because Bohannon and Stanowicz have shown only partial negative evidence, the results have no bearing on existing formal proofs of learnability; also, the learnability proofs proposed by M. E. Gold (1967) actually tell us very little about what may or may not be innate. Finally, it is pointed out that there are cases of language acquisition in which feedback does not appear to occur. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Shapes of early change in psychotherapy under routine outpatient conditions.

Although improvement of clients' state is a central concern for psychotherapy, relatively little is known about how change in outcome variables unfolds during psychotherapy. Client progress may follow highly variable temporal courses, and this variation in treatment courses may have important clinical implications. By analyzing treatment progress using growth mixture modeling up to the 6th session in a sample of 192 outpatients treated under routine clinic conditions, the authors identified 5 client groups based on similar progress on the short form versions of the Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation-Outcome Measure. The shapes of early change typical for these client groups were characterized by (a) high initial impairment, (b) low initial impairment, (c) early improvement, (d) medium impairment with continuous treatment progress, or (e) medium impairment with discontinuous treatment progress. Moreover, the shapes of early change were associated with different treatment outcomes and durations, and several intake variables (depression, anxiety, and age) enabled prediction of the shape of early change and/or prediction of individual treatment progress within client groups with similar shapes of change. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adaptive feedback and review paradigm for computer-based drills.

Tested the effectiveness of a direct-instruction approach used with the corrective feedback paradigm (CFP) in a drill and practice program that included adaptive feedback techniques with discrimination training and increasing ratio review. 102 undergraduates were randomly assigned to 1 of 6 drill-treatment groups. Each group varied the type of review and corrective feedback: Group 1 (increasing ratio review and adaptive feedback with training); Group 2 (immediate review only and adaptive feedback with training); Group 3 (increasing ratio review and adaptive feedback); Group 4 (immediate review only and adaptive feedback); Group 5 (no review and adaptive feedback), and Group 6 (increasing ratio review and fixed feedback). The task consisted of learning 20 English–Japanese (transliterated) word pairs. Planned orthogonal comparisons demonstrated the statistical superiority on posttest performance of increasing ratio review and adaptive feedback with discrimination training, with no significant differences in time to mastery. Using CFP to teach generalizations is advocated. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attitude change and justification for compliance.

"This experiment has tentatively illustrated some of the processes involved in creating and reducing psychological dissonance and the implications of such dissonance for attitude change in compliance situations. It was hypothesized that increased justification for taking an opinion position discrepant from one's private opinion would lead to decreased dissonance and therefore decreased attitude change toward the discrepant position. Ss were asked to write an essay taking a stand opposite to their initial opinion on a given issue. One group of Ss was then given a number of reasons for compliance with the request (high justification condition). For another group (low justification condition) Ss were given no detailed justification for writing the essay. Attitude change was determined from a postexperimental questionnaire… . Attitude change tended to be greater where manipulated (and perceived) justification was least." From Psyc Abstracts 36:01:1GD76C. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inhibiting and facilitating conditions of the human smile: A nonobtrusive test of the facial feedback hypothesis.

We investigated the hypothesis that people's facial activity influences their affective responses. Two studies were designed to both eliminate methodological problems of earlier experiments and clarify theoretical ambiguities. This was achieved by having subjects hold a pen in their mouth in ways that either inhibited or facilitated the muscles typically associated with smiling without requiring subjects to pose in a smiling face. Study 1's results demonstrated the effectiveness of the procedure. Subjects reported more intense humor responses when cartoons were presented under facilitating conditions than under inhibiting conditions that precluded labeling of the facial expression in emotion categories. Study 2 served to further validate the methodology and to answer additional theoretical questions. The results replicated Study 1's findings and also showed that facial feedback operates on the affective but not on the cognitive component of the humor response. Finally, the results suggested that both inhibitory and facilitatory mechanisms may have contributed to the observed affective responses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Different frames for change.

Briefly replies to writings by Whitaker (see record 1989-98357-000) and J. Bergman ([1985]. Fishing for barracuda. New York: W. W. Norton) on the topic of clinicians' facilitation of client change. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A brief feedback intervention for diagnostic overshadowing.

Clinical decision-making errors are well-documented among both experienced clinicians and students. One robust clinical decision-making error is called diagnostic overshadowing (DO), which occurs when the presence of one diagnosis interferes with the detection of other diagnoses. This study tested whether two types of instruction and brief feedback interventions reduced the likelihood of DO. Specifically, content-based feedback and principle-based feedback significantly reduced the likelihood of DO among doctoral students in clinical and counseling psychology (N = 220). An intervention effect was found when the training task and the target task were highly similar. Recommendations for improving diagnostic decision-making among trainees in professional psychology are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Delayed auditory feedback and movement.

It is well known that timing of rhythm production is disrupted by delayed auditory feedback (DAF), and that disruption varies with delay length. We tested the hypothesis that disruption depends on the state of the movement trajectory at the onset of DAF. Participants tapped isochronous rhythms at a rate specified by a metronome while hearing DAF (for piano tones) of differing lengths. Motion capture was used to analyze movement trajectories. Mean Inter-Response Intervals (IRIs) varied as an approximately sinusoidal function of feedback condition, with DAF causing slowed production for shorter delays and speeded production for faster delays. Motion capture analyses revealed that finger velocity at the time of DAF predicted the effect of DAF on mean IRI whereas finger position predicted the variability of IRIs. A second experiment in which participants were instructed to vary the timing of peak finger height confirmed that the effect of DAF on timing variability is directly influenced by the finger trajectory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Collecting client feedback.

While highly effective, psychotherapy outcome studies suggest 5–14% of clients worsen while in treatment and that therapists are unable to identify a substantial portion of such cases. Methods to systematically collect feedback from psychotherapy clients are discussed and two systems for monitoring treatment response, feeding back this information, and assisting in problem-solving with such cases are described. Within these systems, obtaining client ratings of their relationship appear to be highly important. We summarize meta-analyses of the effects of these feedback systems (The combined weighted random effect size for the Partners for Change Outcome Management System was r = .23, 95% CI [.15, .31], p k = 3, n = 558; the effect size for the Feedback condition of the Outcome Questionnaire (OQ) system among not-on-track patients was r = .25, 95% CI [.15, .34], p k = 4, n = 454; the effect size for the Patient/Therapist Feedback condition of the OQ system among not-on-track patients was r = .25, 95% CI [.15, .34], p k = 3, n = 495; the effect size for the Clinical Support Tools feedback condition among not-on-track patients was r = .33, 95% CI [.25, .40], p k = 3, n = 535). The number of psychotherapy patients who deteriorate can be cut in half by use of these systems. We conclude with a series of practice implications, including that clinicians seriously consider making formal methods of collecting client feedback a routine part of their daily practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Delayed auditory feedback.

When S hears his own voice with a small time delay his speech may be seriously affected. The effects produced by delayed auditory feedback (DAF) include prolongation of vowels, repetition of consonants, increased intensity of utterance, and other articulatory changes. The significance of individual differences in susceptibility to DAF is considered in relation to personality and physiological characteristics. The technique may prove useful in the detection of auditory malingering and has possible implications for the understanding of stammering. The discussion relates the findings to models of speech control. Methodological problems and future research needs are outlined. (74 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change: Reactions to Rogers' 1957 article.

Carl Rogers' article (see record 2007-14639-002) on the necessary and sufficient conditions for personality change has had a significant impact on the field of psychotherapy and psychotherapy research. He emphasized the client as arbiter of his or her own subjective experience and tested his hypothesized therapist-offered conditions of change using recorded sessions. This aided in demystifying the therapeutic process and led to a radical shift in the listening stance of the therapist. I briefly outline my views regarding the influence of the ideas presented in this work, describe the intellectual and cultural context of the times, and discuss a number of ways in which the therapist-offered conditions for psychological transformation are neither necessary nor sufficient. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)